Hands-on Introduction to Business Process Management 11g

Hands-On Oracle Business Process Management 11g

Introduction to Business Process Management 11g

Scenario
The following Hands-On Labs will work in demonstrating different capabilities of the new Oracle Business Process Management 11g platform. For this exercise, we will focus our efforts on the Sales Quote business process where a Sales Quote is submitted for approval needing to be reviewed and processed by different groups and individuals in an organization.

Objective
The objective of this hand on labs, is to show you the Sales Quote business process in action to demonstrate how end users interact with the deployed business process as well as the up front modeling experience by a business analysts using BPM Studio where it is possible to run simulation and other important activities related to the implementation of the before mentioned business process. During this session, we will touch base on: Process Execution Performing business operations using rich User Interfaces Business Process Modeling Business Process Simulation Interactions between BPM Studio and Process Composer Process Management

Materials
Oracle BPM Studio 11g (early access of Oracle Business Process Management 11g).

Hands-On Oracle Business Process Management 11g

Task List
Introduction to Business Process Management 11g.........................................................1 Reset Environment......................................................................................................3 Importing the BPM Project in BPM Studio.......................................................................3 Understanding the Sales to Quote Business Process........................................................5 Running the Sales to Quote business process.................................................................7 Exploring process behavior with Simulation.................................................................. 15 Sharing the business process with Process Composer ...................................................20 Managing your process instances from Enterprise Manager ...........................................23

Hands-On Oracle Business Process Management 11g

Reset Environment
Before starting the session it is necessary to restart the environment so that we can use the base project without any modifications that we may be doing during this lab exercise. For this, find a shortcut in the desktop called Init Project. Double click on it and wait for the process to finish. Once this step is completed, we are ready to start the BPM journey

Importing the BPM Project in BPM Studio

1. Launch BPM Studio. In this environment, you need to double click on the BPM Studio shortcut available on the desktop. 2. Select the Default Role entry and click Ok to proceed. 3. Click on the Open Application entry in the left hand side navigator and browse the SalesQuoteDemo folder in the Desktop. Then select the SalesQuoteDemo.jws

4. BPM Studio will open the project that contains the Sales To Quote business process. 5. Now, lets navigate to the BPM Project Navigator and expand the Processes tree folder and double click on the SalesQuoteProcess entry. This will open the business process that will be explained in the following section.

Hands-On Oracle Business Process Management 11g

BPM Studio is the new unified IDE where it is possible to encapsulate in a BPM project different assets including BPMN 2.0 processes as well as BPEL processes all combined in a single project folder. In addition to supporting business processes in these 2 standards (with its corresponding native execution on the BPM Runtime), it is possible to develop User Tasks, Business Rules, integration with backend components through the Oracle Adapter framework, all from a single modeling experience (BPM Studio). This not only simplifies the BPM Project development experience but expedites the BPM lifecycle and accelerates project deployments.

Hands-On Oracle Business Process Management 11g

Understanding the Sales to Quote Business Process

The first step in the lab is to do a walk through of the final implemented business process so that we can understand and feel first hand what is the interaction with the end users of the system. For starters, the business process will implement a solution for Sales Representations to submit Sales Quotes and manage all the approvals within a particular Sales organization. A quick recap on the business process definition and its flow is detailed below.

The Business Process is initiated by an event, taking place in Siebel. This event will first create a Task to Enter the Quote details in the Enter Quote interactive step Enter Quote. After the quote details have been entered, the process instance will move all the way to the Business Practice Review and wait for an approver in the Business Practices Role to make the needed approval processing. This is shown in the figure above.

After the Business Practices Review has been completed, the process instance will move to the Approve Quote and Approve Terms activities that are being executed in parallel and concurrently. The Approve Quote activity will be executed by approvers in the Approvers role and the Approve Terms by individuals that have been assigned the Contracts role in the organization. This is shown in the figure below. Once these 2 steps in the business process have been completed successfully, the process instance will move on to the Finalize Contracts step and will wait for its final approval by an individual in the Contracts role. This is shown in the figure below.
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BPM Studio is the new unified IDE that is based on BPMN 2.0 and BPEL and in addition to adhering to standards it can fully integrate it with the unique and powerful capabilities of Oracle SOA Suite leveraging among others the integration framework and composite deployment model.

Hands-On Oracle Business Process Management 11g

Running the Sales to Quote business process

Creating a process instance
The real scenario gets the Sales Quote Request coming from Siebel. In our case, we will mimic this event starting the process with an event we will manually infect from the SOA Infrastructure Console. For this, lets open the testData.xml file. Right click on the file and select Open with Text Editor. Mark the whole content, right click on it, and copy its content on the clipboard by selecting Copy from the drop down menu.

Open the SOA Infra Console on the browser by entering the following URL: http://bpmlab:8001/soa-infra When asked to the credentials enter weblogic/weblogic1. The following is the page once you have been authenticated correctly.

Hands-On Oracle Business Process Management 11g

Click on the Test RequestQuote.service entry and then select the XML Source radio button option. Remove the existing XML content and paste the content copied from the Text Editor as show below.

Click on the Invoke button at the bottom of the panel and the process instance will be created !!! Connecting to WorkList to process tasks 1. Once the process instance has been created, it is time to log into the WorkList application to start processing the tasks associated to the process in which the process instance was created. For this, open your browser and enter the following URL: http://bpmlab:8001/integration/worklistapp 2. As the process instance indicated the Sales Rep associated to this Quote request was jcooper, this will be the user well use as shown below. The password for this user is welcome1.

Hands-On Oracle Business Process Management 11g

3. Once jcooper is logged in, there should be a task in the My Tasks section pending for execution as shown below. It would be possible to observe that the task is pending for execution in the Enter Quote step which happens to be the first interactive step in the Sales To Quote business process.

4. Select the task, and the lower part of the WorkList interface will render the associated UserTask implementation for entering the quote as shown below.

Hands-On Oracle Business Process Management 11g

5. This first panel contains basic information about the customer for which the quote is being requested. Lets click on the Select Products node in the sequential workflow at the top of the form and the panel below will change to the one to enter the products on the quote.

6. Drag and Drop product entries from the left hand side panel into the right and adjust the product SKUs quantities accordingly. Then click on the Request Discounts entry on the top workflow image.

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7. Once the percentage discounts were entered, click on the Request Terms. Select the NonStandardLicensing or any of the available ones and a proper type (this again can be any value from the drop down).

8. Once the quote has been thoroughly created by the Sales Representative, it is time to submit it for the Business Practices Review which is the second activity in our process. The final summary page is shown below (Submit Quote step in the top flow diagram). Click on the Ok button to submit it to the next step. The task should dissapear from jcoopers inbox if it could be processed successfully.

9. Now, we will log out with jcooper and log in back with jstein. The password for jstein is welcome1. This use has administrative permissions over the Sales Quote process and it will be the
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user to use through the rest of the run-through. Once logged in, the task will be on jsteins inbox as shown in the figure below. After clicking on the task, the Quote Summary form will be shown at the bottom of the task list.

10. Lets assume jstein wants to change the approvers to be shown in the approvers flow. This can be done if he selects the Administration Tasks tab and select the Quote that is being worked on. When this task is selected, at the bottom, a new form will be presented and on the right hand side, it is possible to overwrite the approval hierarchies initially assigned by default. This is shown in the figure below.

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Hands-On Oracle Business Process Management 11g

11. Click on the John Steinback entry on the Tier3 level and click on the + button that was enabled after selecting this entry. A new dialog will be opened where it is possible to add additional approvers. In our case, we will select jlondon. Click Ok to process this request.

12. This selection should be visible as shown in the figure below.

13. Click Apply on the form upper right hand corner to complete this administrative task. 14. Then click on the Approve button on the upper right hand corner of the form. When the task list is refreshed, we should see that the task has been assigned to jlondon. The figure below shows this assignment.

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15. We believe the idea is understood on how tasks can be dynamically assigned to different users in the organization and processed through the WorkList application. To speed up the page of the hands on lab, we will continue to process each one of the missing approval steps from the Administration Tasks tab with jstein. This section has shown the usage of the Oracle ADF framework with its rich UI and form capabilities when combined with Task Flow. This is important to note as all the UI components invoked from the business process layer are deployed along side the BPM project with very rich and friendly interactive experiences. The other important capability shown in this section is sophisticated approval management activities where approval rules can be dynamically changed based on different business needs to properly deliver through very dynamic and complex approval rules and environments.

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Exploring process behavior with Simulation

In this scenario, your job as a business analyst is to identify opportunities for improvement to the process. At the most fundamental level, this boils down to reducing cycles, cost or both. To understand the current cost and cycle time of the process, you will perform a simulation using process statistics collected during the last months of deployment. This way, you can compare the current process performance to any improvements you may make. The process simulation model has been created with information obtained from the last month of execution or by just information collected ad hoc if this business process is just being implemented and never executed before. 1. Click on the Simulation Tab at the bottom of BPM Studio. The panel shown below is what you should expect when clicking on this panel for the first time.

2. Currently the project has been configured to have a single Project Simulation that includes the Sales Quote process in it and it is ready for execution. Lets open the Project Simulation panel for a quick glance. For this, expand the Simulations node in the BPM Project navigator and expand the Simulation Definitions node and then double click on the QuoteSimulationDefinition entry. The result should the the opened panel as shown in the figure below. Make sure that the RequestQuote process is indeed included in the simulation.

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3. Now it is time for simulation execution !!! Lets move back to the simulation panel and click on the left hand side Play green button as shown below.

4. This will start the process simulation execution in animation mode. Click on the Request Quote Tab to return to the business process view in the main canvas and see the simulation animation in action. If you speed up the simulation execution and center your attention around the Approve Quote activity, it would be easy to see that the is a bottleneck in this step due to insufficient resources available for properly processing this user centric business process step.

5. Click on the second right hand side Play button as shown below to run the simulation to its end without animation to have a chance to make changes to our simulation model and re-execute it again for its analysis after improvements has been introduced.

6. Once the simulation execution completed, click on the Indicators icon on the simulation panel toolbar and select the Time category that is the one we will use to analyze bottlenecks related to processing times.

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7. After the time category has been selected, the main metrics panel will show the proper analytics. Click on the Drill Down icon as shown below to get the details on the Request Quote process activities.

8.

Lets proceed to clean up this panel by selecting only the human centric steps in the process as shown in the figure below.

9. This time it is very clear that the problems are in the Approve Quote step and most likely related to missing resources given the time it takes to process this human centric step. The cycle times are in the order of 10 hours of processing, a situation that indeed is not desirable.

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10. Lets make a change to the process simulation configuration. On the Project Navigator, move to the Simulations entries and double click on the QuoteProcessNormalSimulationModel. A panel like the one below should be opened.

11. Select the Activities Tab and click on the Approve Quote. This has been the problematic step as detected in the previous simulation execution. Instead of its current 2 resources, lets increase this to 5 users that would be able to process quote approvals. Save the process simulation model and lets go back to the Simulation Tab to start the execution of the modified process simulation model. 12. After running the simulation again upon completion, lets analyze the results and compare them to the previous execution. We will see that the average cycle times moved from 10 hours to 20 minutes. This is indeed a great achievement in improvement. This is shown in the diagram below.

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13. Now we are ready to present this information to the process owner and decide whether the hires can take place to improve the overall response time for processing Sale Quote approvals. Simulation and its animation allow business analysts get a grasp on their possible execution results before the business process is actually deployed. Furthermore, as the simulation is executed on top of the BPMN modeled process and each one of the BPMN activities are fully embraced in the simulation engine, it allows a quick and accurate mapping to execution.

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Sharing the business process with Process Composer

Now that we have seen the Sales Quote business process in action and ran some simulations, we would like to walk you through the new component in the BPM 11g called Process Composer. Process Composer is a web-based application that allows collaboration and interoperation for BPM Projects between BPM Studio and Process Composer. These 2 components can be connected to MDS (Metadata Store Repository) and be in sync all the time when implementing changes to their BPM project assets. The scope of this lab is to connect to Process Composer and consume that latest version of the Sales Quote project and see how this could be edited into this new interface. 1. Launch Process Composer by opening the following URL: http://bpmlab:8001/bpm/composer. A welcome page like the following will be presented to the business analyst. Log in as weblogic with password weblogic1.

2. Once logged in, the business analyst will be presented with a welcome page where it is possible to create new projects or load existing projects (the amount of projects to show may be different from what you may see in your lab environment).

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3. Select the SalesQuoteProcess by double clicking on it. This will open the selected BPM project into Process Composer. 4. Once the selected project has been opened, expand the Processes folder on the left hand side navigator and double click on the RequestQuote entry. This will open the business process oin the center edition area.

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5. This diagram should resemble what you have seen in BPM Studio as it is the same business process only rendered in this new web-based application. This section highlights the importance of a lightweight web-based modeling environment where quick and easy collaboration can be enforced between IT and business. The round trip synchronization enforced through MDS will enforce more up to date metadata, quicker collaboration and faster time to on-boarding new BPM projects.

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Managing your process instances from Enterprise Manager

One of the other administrative tasks that can be exercised is the ability to check the audit trail for in flight instances. The supervision of in flight process instances can be checked and analyzed from within Oracle Enterprise Manager. This can be very useful when needing to check where a process instance is located, who executed along side any additional audit information that may be required. This section of the hands of labs will focus on walking you through this aspect. 1. Log into the Oracle Enterprise Manager web-based interface opening the following URL: http://bpmlab:7001/em. This is a Web Application that is automatically deployed the first time it is accessed so it may take a little bit to come up. When the login dialog comes up, use the weblogic user and weblogic1 as password.

2. After logging in, lets navigate through the SOA node on the left hand side navigator all the way down to the SalesQuoteProcess entry and double click on it. This will show general analytical information about this very specific process just selected.

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3. Lets click on one of the most recent accessed process instance ids (the one on the top). A new dialog will be opened containing the audit trail for this process instance.

4. This new dialog allows inspecting what steps have been completed and at what time and what are the new pending steps to make the instance move forward.
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5. Additionally, it is possible to drill down into the specific steps through the enabled hyperlinks and get more details. For example, click on the Enter Quote entry and it will be possible to get the following additional information.

This section shows how important it is when it comes to having a single point of truth for the current state of in flight instances. In the same administration console, were it is possible to administer the BPM infrastructure, it is also possible to perform additional administrative tasks like looking for process instances and see a full and complete audit trail.

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